This post was written by FSF campaigns manager Zak Rogoff and
community member Andrew Ferguson.

In April, the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project
announced evaluations of several major repository-hosting
services. These services are the bedrock infrastructure that our
community uses to collaborate and communicate while building software,
and therefore a big part of what we put into the construction process
that creates free software. Using the GNU Ethical Criteria for Code
Repositories, the evaluations judge code-hosting services for their
commitment to user privacy and freedom. Now we are asking you to help
support sites that meet the criteria and improve those that do not.

Currently, Savannah and GitLab meet or surpass the
baseline standards of the criteria. You can explore the completed
evaluations on the evaluation page. The criteria page offers
more information on the evaluation process, as well as the criteria
themselves.

Ethical code hosting is important not just for developers, but for
users of free software, too. Repositories usually provide Web sites
with downloadable executable programs compiled from the code they
host, and are thus a popular way for users to get up-to-date copies of
free software. The sites also host issue trackers that let users
submit bug reports and provide feedback to developers.

Because they are central to free software in so many ways, the
practices of code hosting services have ripples into the world of free
software, and software in general. The repository evaluations promote
and honor good ethical practices by repositories, and make it easy for
users to find services that respect them.

There are four things you can do to help, depending on how you
participate in the free software community:

Share the criteria and evaluations with the administrators of
hosting services, and discuss them in communities of developers that
use such sites.

If you are a developer, use code hosting services that score at
least an acceptable rating per the criteria.

If you help administer a repository-hosting service, contact the
experts at repo-criteria-discuss@gnu.org for help improving your
score. We are friendly and eager to help!

"More volunteers with coding ability are needed to aid the development
of existing repository services to help them meet these criteria,"
said Andrew Ferguson, a community member who played a leadership role
in the evaluation project. "All community members are encouraged to
write the administrators of code-hosting services, to build awareness
and a motivation to improve their ethical evaluations. GitHub has
responded to some requests from the free software community and has
recently updated its license chooser to include the GPLv3
license. However more community advocacy is required, as GitHub still
fails to meet the criteria."

Indeed, political pressure and technical assistance from the free
software developer community are the best tools we have for improving
the ethical practices of code hosting sites. We expect many successes
in this journey in the years to come, as projects like the ethical
criteria for code hosting repositories build awareness of the
infrastructure of free software development.